Thoughts
A Decade of Blame Awareness
October 13, 2026
Implementing “blame aware” varies wildly... and can be surprising
Reflection on SREcon 2026
April 6, 2026
Four themes from this year's premier gathering of site reliability engineers!
Adapting to the Moment
January 26, 2026
I finally realized what this moment was stirring up for me: it’s reminding me of the first weeks of COVID lockdowns.
A Spectrum of Actions, Part III
August 10, 2023
(Or: “What do the stories we tell each other about whether we’re reeaaaallllyyyyy gonna do that action item mean?”")
A Spectrum of Actions, Part II
August 7, 2023
Can we better gauge whether or not we’re reeaaaallllyyyyy gonna do that action item?
Rewriting Harmful Analogies While They’re In Use
July 17, 2023
No, you’re not “rebuilding the plane in flight”; you’re not even flying!
Updating Rasmussen’s Triangle for a Modern World
June 28, 2023
On proposing a modest update to the venerable safety science model.
“Write It So It’s Right”: A New Rite in Dev-Assist AI?
June 22, 2023
As software teams start to pair program with AI bots, what do ‘right’ and ‘working’ mean?
REdeploy is REturning!
May 1, 2019
REdeploy, the industry's premier resilient socio-technical systems conference, returns to San Francisco this October!
I Ran This Whole Conference and I Didn't Even Get a T-shirt
April 11, 2019
Some thoughts on running a first year conference.
The 737Max and Why Software Engineers Might Want to Pay Attention
March 14, 2019
As the unique case of the Boeing 737Max plays out, software engineers would do well to pay attention.
Dev, Ops, and Determinism
February 27, 2019
Could the way we, as engineers, think about 'determinism' play into how we think about incidents?
Signed, Sealed, and Delivered
February 13, 2019
Announcing original research on the use of post-incident analysis artifacts!
Talking Pay in the Public Square
September 24, 2018
How to talk about a taboo subject to get useful tidbits.
Mobile Doesn’t Suck: The Web Made Us Lazy
January 17, 2014
The web let us ship whenever we liked and ignore what users wanted; mobile is handing some of that control back.
The Data-driven Dilemma
January 14, 2014
Whenever you hear “We’re a data-driven organization,” watch how a few contentious decisions actually get made.
Old Checksums Collide Hard
January 8, 2014
Our industry still publishes MD5 checksums—and now SHA1 isn’t looking so great either.
A WARP’d View of History
December 15, 2013
What IBM’s OS/2 Warp has to do with Star Trek, lawyers, and Captain Janeway.
The Subversive Repository
August 5, 2013
Why not confusing the FBI is a surprisingly compelling reason to use Git.
Mental Models: Mattering. (Still.)
July 23, 2013
Putting deploy secrets in git is “neat-o magic” that breaks the mental model people need.